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War and conflict
This Week in AsiaOpinion

Asian AngleCarbon bootprints: how war is fuelling climate catastrophe

The military-industrial complex’s vast carbon footprint is deliberately hidden from public view, while we get gaslit into using paper straws

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An Israeli tank carries out manoeuvres in Gaza as seen from the Israeli side of the border on July 28. Photo: Reuters
Chandran Nair
Gaza was supposed to be our nadir. A horrific, isolated eruption of warfare’s most satanic ethos – the annihilation of the other – showing its true face to the world. Instead, the scale and persistence of Gaza’s destruction risks becoming normalised, just another data point in humanity’s catastrophic descent into ethnically and religiously motivated violence. As Israel and the United States’ recent unprovoked attack on Iran demonstrates, we live in an era of escalating wars, where international laws are ignored, violence is institutionalised and diplomacy is increasingly cast aside as an obstacle to the economic objectives of the global war industry.

At the heart of this nightmare is the old Western world, desperate to retain ill-gotten privileges and hegemony, even as a multipolar order takes shape. Their inability to reconcile with a fairer global landscape drives them to lash out – and the whole world pays the price.

The proliferation of digital media has inundated us with an endless loop of mutilated bodies and bombed-out hospitals, numbing us to the suffering. On social media, mourning war’s victims is both common and curiously performative; yet we must not deny the horrifying ease with which violence has become background noise for our coffee breaks. Thoughts and prayers trend, but distractions follow in the next instant.

Palestinians inspect the rubble after an Israeli strike on the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on July 23. Photo: AFP
Palestinians inspect the rubble after an Israeli strike on the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on July 23. Photo: AFP
For those living through conflict, suffering extends far beyond bullets and bombs. In Gaza today, starvation is weaponised. Children are orphaned and forced to breathe toxic smoke from burning oil refineries; farmers till land riddled with depleted uranium; generations are condemned to water poisoned by munitions and chemicals. War is not a finite event. Its devastation ripples on, bringing slow-motion environmental ruin that haunts communities long after the guns fall silent.

Tragically, contemporary climate debates are reduced to corporate slogans, “net zero” fairy tales and performative guilt over individual carbon footprints. Western leaders feign concern for islands at risk of submersion even as they ignore the military-industrial complex’s colossal environmental and climate damage. The machines of destruction roll on, enriching the merchants of death with every bomb manufactured, sold and detonated.

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